Uncover - S8 "Brainwashed" E5: We tortured some folks

Episode Date: September 25, 2020

MKULTRA was supposed to have ended in the 1960s. The torturous experiments didn’t work. So why did these techniques evolve and continue to be used by American trainers throughout Latin America, and then get revived once again in the era that followed the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks? The CIA’s Black Sites and a courtroom inside the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base may hold some of the answers. This is Uncover: Brainwashed. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/brainwashed-transcripts-listen-1.5734335 For transcripts of this series, please visit:

The music teacher says it was consensual sex. His former students say it was rape. He had sex with me once in the classroom, in a closet. Something happened to me too. I thought he was our little predator. Why wasn't he stopped? These women seek answers and justice. I'm Julie Ireton, host of The Banned Teacher.

It's available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. Just that somebody could be this diabolical. This is a CBC Podcast. On an island with nowhere to go, playing all the iguana rockin' hits, it's AFn radio gitmo the five defendants all sit on the left hand side and they're in these rows

of their respective tables with their attorneys with k Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in the first row. It's January 2020 on the US Naval Station Base, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in a makeshift courtroom where the five alleged conspirators of the 9-11 attacks are on trial. And this was a particularly tense week because Mitchell was going to testify about his activity and it was going to bring out very vividly what in fact had occurred when these defendants were in the black sites. It's sort of interesting because Khalid Sheikh Mohammed didn't react. We all went there, held our breath, wanting to see what would happen.

Dr. Mitchell seemed to focus on expressions on the defendant's faces and whether someone was looking at him funny. You know, it was clear that they had a very odd connection. This was the first time that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was sitting there in the company of the man who waterboarded him. And it was Dr. Mitchell, the interrogator, who was forced to answer the questions. It wasn't violent, it wasn't physical, it wasn't threatening, but as much as Mitchell tried to be in control,

it was the defense lawyers who asked the questions and he had to answer them. And it was a real kind of surreal table's turn moment. had to answer them. And it was a real kind of surreal table's turn moment. James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen are the two psychologists who were paid more than $80 million by the CIA to come up with an interrogation program for high-profile war on terror captives. This was the first time Mitchell and Jessen were forced to testify about the methods they devised. The enhanced interrogation techniques. The EITs.

Waterboarding. Keeping people awake for days on end. Shackling. Confinement boxes. Extreme temperatures, sounds, and pain. They were experiments, really, on how to make people do what you want them to do, make them talk. You could almost think of it as a form of mind control, but most just call it for what it is, torture. I'm Michelle Shepard, and this is Brainwashed.

Episode 5, We Tortured Some Folks. Good afternoon, everybody. Happy Friday. I thought I'd take some questions, but first, let me say a few words about the economy. That's Obama, former U.S. President Barack Obama in 2014, standing before the White House Press Corps. So with that, let me take a couple of questions. Just days after President Obama came to power, he quickly dismantled some of the post-9-11 measures brought in by his predecessor, George W. Bush. George W. Bush, he shut down the network of secret CIA prisons known as black sites and abolished the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, the EIT program that Jessen and Mitchell developed. But by 2014, his presidential honeymoon was over. Guantanamo was still open,

despite his pledge to shut it down, and he was facing questions about the Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA's actions, an investigation into exactly what happened to those CIA captives. The RDI report has been transmitted, the declassified version that will be released at the pleasure of the Senate committee. The RDI report, the CIA's rendition, detention, and interrogation program. Even before I came into office, I was very clear that in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, we did some things that were wrong. We did a whole lot of things that were right, but we tortured some folks. We tortured some folks. It's important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job that those folks had.

But having said all that, we did some things that were wrong. And we have to, as a country, take responsibility for that so that hopefully we don't do it again in the future. Obama's narrative was widely accepted. This was an aberration, something so extreme due to extreme times. That's how these incredibly violent new interrogation methods, the EITs, were invented. When we started this podcast, I knew about post-9-11 policies.

I'd reported on them for years, been to Guantanamo a couple dozen times, and while I knew the vague outlines of MKUltra and the CIA's involvement in foreign conflicts, I had no idea of the direct correlation to modern-day torture. That what took place at the black sites in Guantanamo after the September 11, 2001 attacks, it could be traced back more than half a century earlier, to the start of the Cold War, to MKUltra, and to the Allen in Montreal.

This wasn't new. My name is James Connell, and I am learned counsel for the defense team of Amar Al-Baluchi as part of the Military Commissions Defense Organization, working in the United States Military Comm commissions in Guantanamo Bay. He's an experienced death penalty lawyer, which is required in capital cases. And I have a little disclaimer that I have to give at the beginning, and I know that it never gets picked up verbatim, but that's fine. But the disclaimer is that although I am paid by the United States Department of Defense, I'm not speaking on behalf of the Department of Defense, and that nothing I'm about to say in this interview is based on

classified information. James Connell has top-secret security clearance, which means he knows more than he can say. As a Guantanamo defense attorney, he's fighting to keep his client from being sentenced to death. Not many people would have sympathy for his client or for the four other men accused of orchestrating the 9-11 attacks. But this trial is actually less about them. Because for Connell to most effectively defend Al-Baluchi, he actually has to prosecute the actions of the state. In other words, prove that the CIA tortured his client while in custody.

And to prove that, he's had to go back in time. Before I started the case, I had no idea of how much the United States had grappled with the issue of how to make people do what someone wanted them to do. how to make people do what someone wanted them to do. The amount of money and effort that went into what the CIA called brainwashing is astonishing. That story really begins with the Korean War. because in the Korean War, the North Koreans and Chinese backers used techniques not all that sophisticated to get U.S. service members to say a lot of things that they wanted them to say. And that was around the same time that Director of the CIA Alan D Dulles, in 1953, popularized the word brainwashing in the United States.

He gave a speech at Princeton in which he described a process by which the Chinese could brainwash people. And he even describes the- They took our boys and brainwashed them and had them filmed there so that they would give out the most extraordinary lies. I am no doubt myself, I mean, we've never had any guinea pigs. We can't try this thing out.

We've just deducted reasoning. They have had in their slave camps, in their prison camps, they have had an indefinite number of people whom they can try out all these techniques. And they are so many years ahead of us in all that, I mean, there's no comparison. As the CIA's director was publicly discussing communist brainwashing, lamenting the fact that the U.S. didn't have human guinea pigs, the CIA was secretly launching MKUltra, a program that essentially would give them human guinea pigs, prisoners, clients of sex workers, even their own agency staff, and of course, the psychiatric patients at the Allen.

The CIA never did learn how to brainwash people. And here's the thing, neither did the communist governments. When scientists actually studied the American POWs returning from the Korean War, they discovered a far more simple explanation for all the strange behaviour. The men had been tortured. So the US Air Force created a program to better prepare their forces should they become prisoners of war. It was called SEER. That story really begins with the creation of the SEER program. That stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape.

The program of how to resist interrogation. The first SEER students were American pilots. After the Vietnam War, soldiers and sailors also underwent the training. Today, every branch of the military has its own program, and most of the curriculum remains classified. The idea behind SEER is that you expose your troops to horrible treatment in a controlled environment so that if they are captured and tortured, they'll be better equipped to endure the abuse. But while

the military was developing their internal SEER program to build defenses against interrogations and torture, the CIA was creating its own manual for how to conduct interrogations using torture. Remember Sidney Gottlieb, the guy who ran MKUltra? Gottlieb's research produced some written observations, some reports that were kept within the CIA about how do you destroy a person? How do you interrogate a person? How can you make a prisoner dependent on the interrogator? This is Stephen Kinzer, who wrote the book on Gottlieb, calling him the poisoner-in-chief. He had so much experience with the hundreds of expendables that he experimented to death.

So he wrote up some guidelines for how to do this. These secret CIA guidelines would evolve into other manuals that would be circulated within the agency and beyond. These manuals were used throughout Latin America in the 1970s and 80s. When they arrested me and they took me to the Departamento de Información Estó, I was there tortured basically during the first three days. They would use traditional electric shock. They would put it in different parts of my body. Maria says her torturers were university educated and their methods more sophisticated.

They not only used electrical shocks, but also simulated the voices of her family on tape. They were working with electricity and they played with my body and my mind. They were doctors, some of them psychiatrists, who not only used electricity, but also tried to brainwash her. Their knowledge of the body and the mind made them both effective and cruel torturers. Both Salvadorans came across men who told them the truth. The CIA's involvement in this torture

was finally revealed by a Baltimore Sun investigation. The newspaper found that the CIA had been training Honduran military forces accused of kidnapping, torture, and murder. For three years, the Baltimore Sun fought to have the CIA's training manuals declassified under a Freedom of Information request. Only after the paper threatened to sue the agency did the CIA turn over the redacted documents in 1997. Two manuals were released, a 1983 handbook given the beautifully bureaucratic title of the Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual,

and another written in the early 1960s, just as MKUltra was winding down. The so-called Kubark assassination manual, Kubark being the CIA's cryptonym for itself. The official name for the manual was Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation. Over 128 pages, the manual details suggested interrogation methods. The principal techniques include deprivation of sensory stimuli, threats and fear, pain, hypnosis, and narcosis. It includes references to, quote, a number of experiments at McGill University, with long sections devoted to sensory deprivation. at McGill University, with long sections devoted to sensory deprivation.

The core of the manual directly relies on Dr. Ewan Cameron's work at McGill and his theory that to make a mind more malleable, you had to break it down to an infantile state. The prisoners must essentially be de-patterned so they would look to their interrogators as a father figure. so they would look to their interrogators as a father figure. Those torture techniques that we taught to secret police forces in Latin America had their roots back in the Gottlieb era. Now the pattern was clear. The MKUltra experiments evolved into interrogation techniques in Kubark,

which were then updated and used in the Human Resource Exploitation Manual. Call it brainwashing or mind control if you want, but achieving psychological dependence, essentially through torture, is the consistent directive. And finally, after 9-11, when the United States set up Guantanamo and its other network of secret prisons around the world, what kinds of techniques could be used? What should CIA officers do in those prisons? They, again, reached back to Gottlieb's research

and the manuals and the techniques that have been used at Guantanamo and at those secret torture bases that the U.S. established around the world are also drawn directly from Gottlie CIA's research in how to control prisoners, how to destroy their minds, and how to make people you're interrogating feel they have no connection with the outside world and therefore they have to do what you tell them. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons,

but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, we can do this. It feels weird to get you to formally introduce yourself, but go for it. Well, my name is Carol Rosenberg. Carol Rosenberg is a good friend of mine. I'm a reporter with the New York Times, and that's been true for a year now. And before that, I was for many years a reporter with the Miami Herald, starting in 1990. And I cover Guantanamo Bay, the place, the policy, the prison, and stuff related to detainees and particularly the trials these days that are going on down there.

I met Carol in Guantanamo, and for years we shared a tent with three other female journalists on a strip of asphalt in an area the U.S. military called Camp Justice. I can't praise Carol's dogged determination enough. In the press corps, we call her the dean, and no one knows more about Guantanamo than Carol. Where do you want to begin? It really begins in 1990 in Baghdad, but I don't know if that you want to start there. I do want to start there. Go back there. Yeah. Carol has had a long and illustrious career as a journalist. So that starts in the

Middle East when I was a Middle East correspondent. And in the early 90s, the U.S. State Department decided to cut off relations with Sudan. And I had a tip that this was coming. They were going to put them on the sponsors of terror list. And I went over to write about this place where kind of all of the radical leaders and movements had gathered. Hezbollah was there, Hamas was there, I think Carlos the Jackal was there in Khartoum. And there was a guy named Osama bin Laden. And I actually paid no attention to him because I thought he was nobody. And when September 11th happened, I was home on Miami Beach in my house. You want this whole story, Michelle? I do. Keep going.

Okay, so I jumped in my car and drove to the Herald, and one of our two managing editors was standing there. And because I was supposed to be this expert on terrorism, she said, well, who did this? And I said, I guess if you believe what we've been hearing, Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda. The planes resumed about five days later, and they sent me off to the Middle East. And then we started hearing that they might want to put some kind of prison for some kind of prisoners related to the war in Afghanistan in Guantanamo. in Guantanamo. By now it's the end of December 2001,

and then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced that captives would be going to Guantanamo. I would characterize Guantanamo Bay, Cuba as the least worst place we could have selected. And soon after, Carol was on a U.S. military plane to Cuba. Which was January 8th. They brought in 19 reporters and there was no flight off. So we ended up spending one or two nights. Then we were supposed to leave and suddenly the CNN reporter got word that prisoners were on their way to Guantanamo. And this was as much a surprise to people at Guantanamo, I think, as it was to us. And the military tried to rush us off the base. I learned a lot about how to dig in and stay

from the CNN reporter, who at one point hid in the bathroom, which I would not have done, but about how just because they tell you you have to go, you try to negotiate to stay. The journalists weren't leaving, not when a plane load of captives was on the way. American gunboats were off the coast. Marines were arrayed around the airstrip. And a cargo plane from the American Air Force came in, landed at Gitmo. And one by one, they pulled off 20 men in orange jumpsuits with goggles on their face and blue surgical masks on their mouths and caps on their head

and mittens taped to their hands, which were shackled together, and shuffled them off that plane in these tight little leg shackles. They were coming from ice-cold Afghanistan. It was winter there. They'd been in an ice-cold cargo plane. They hit the heat in Guantanamo, and they collapsed one by one on their knees to the ground as they were being held by the Marines. They got put on a bus, shackled to the floor of a white school bus,

were driven onto a ferry, went across the bay, drove down Sherman Avenue, past the movie theater, the neighborhoods, the McDonald's, to the other end of Guantanamo Bay, and were put into cages that looked like kennels in what was called Camp X-Ray. And that day, January 11, 2002, the Guantanamo Detention Center was born. That was what the public was allowed to see that day, or rather what the journalists were allowed to record for the public through their words. No photos or videos were allowed. And they certainly couldn't witness what went on with the prisoners once they were behind closed doors in Guantanamo, let alone what was happening elsewhere. They told us we were getting the worst of the worst, and that became sort of the slogan and the idea that the eventual 779 people who passed through Guantanamo were the worst of the worst.

But the truth of the matter is, is for the first five years of Guantanamo from 2002 until September 2006, they weren't the worst of the worst. the worst. The U.S. military and the U.S. government and the U.S. intelligence agencies, the FBI and the CIA, created a secret program. The men who they thought were the high-value captives, that's what they called them, were taken to a secret set of prisons run by the CIA around the world. So while the reporters were trying to figure out the quagmire that was Guantanamo, there were prisoners no one even knew about. These so-called high-value detainees who had disappeared into the black sites. What went on in the black sites of the CIA was that experiment on steroids, because nobody knew about it.

The U.S. didn't acknowledge it. To understand how this happened and what went on in these CIA black sites, we have to go back to test case number one. Test case number one. This is when the CIA consulted with psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, and the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques were developed. The CIA wanted answers, fast, from a detainee known as Abu Zubaydah, and they figured that these two psychologists could help.

Abu Zubaydah was suspected of belonging to al-Qaeda and having information about impending attacks. He was picked up in Pakistan in 2002, but taken to a CIA secret prison. By the time Mitchell and Justin get called by the CIA, they have this man named Abu Zubaydah in Thailand. And the FBI has been interrogating him and trying to use what they say was rapport building coupled with some certainly isolation

techniques and other things. And the CIA was impatient and didn't think that the FBI was working. And they decided to, you know, I think the quote is, take the gloves off and design a different program that would dismantle these people's self-esteem in a way and get them to spill everything they knew. And so these two men get hired. First is consultants charged with coming up with these interrogation techniques. Mitchell says they were in Washington, I believe, and they sat in a room and they typed up a list of them. And they included things like short shackling, sleep deprivation,

confining people to a cramped box, waterboarding, dietary manipulation. They came up with a list of these things. The RDI report, the one Obama was talking about at the press conference, the one that details what happened to Abu Zubaydah and 118 other detainees in CIA custody, it's more than 6,700 pages long, and only 549 of those pages are public in an executive summary, and even those ones are censored. Mitchell and Jessen are

mentioned in the report under pseudonyms, quote, neither psychologist had experience as an interrogator, nor did either have specialized knowledge of al-Qaeda, a background in terrorism, or any relevant regional, cultural, or linguistic expertise. The only experience they could draw upon was from their involvement with the Air Force SEER program and the CIA's past experiments. But as noted in the Senate's report, even the CIA knew coercive interrogations didn't work. MKUltra was a failure. Kubark and the Human Resource Exploitation Manual just left a litany of abused and broken prisoners. The CIA's inspector general even once recommended that an unidentified CIA agent

who was involved in interrogations in Latin America in the 1980s be admonished for his, quote, interrogation techniques. After the September 11, 2001 attacks, that same agent was put in charge of interrogations for post-9-11 captives. captives. First, I think it's important that Mitchell and Jessen really were not the wizards that designed and imagined the program. I do think that they were used by the authorities above them in the agency and probably in the White House to come up with something like this. This is retired Army General Stephen Zanakis. He's a psychiatrist who specializes in PTSD and has worked extensively both with soldiers and veterans and the captives at Guantanamo. I've known him for years.

But they came up with these ideas. I think that essentially what they based their understanding was bad science, completely not validated in any way. There's no reason to think that it would have any positive effect and to be useful. When you say bad science, what do you mean? What was it drawn on? What other experiments do you think that they might have borrowed from? Well, there actually had been never any studies to show that good intelligence was retrieved from using these kinds of tactics or techniques. And I, in fact, in the 70s, interviewed a number of POWs coming out of Vietnam that they didn't produce good information

when they were under high duress, when they were tortured. They just said what they needed to say to stop it. Stephen Zanakis was among the early whistleblowers, questioning the abusive interrogations both in his capacity as a retired general and a doctor. In 2005 he wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post and immediately felt the backlash. I felt shunned and I called a number of my colleagues, two and three stars, and these were former Surgeon General of the Army

and a surgeon of the other services. And they told me very pointedly, they said, Steve, I think you're wrong. We don't get involved. We don't make those decisions. And if our other senior people tell us that that's what's their policies and are. We're going to support and follow it. My response was, we have our own ethics codes. I mean, we're expected to be independent professionals. People look to us, particularly as clinicians, when we wear the white coats, to abide by those codes.

So there's basically no science backing the effectiveness of these new techniques, which doctors and psychologists were heavily involved in. And yet, precious few in the medical community objected. Why? Well, I think fear is at the core. I felt that from the beginning. And I remember telling my family members that we don't want to get into a climate like we had in the 50s. You know, I was in grade school and in junior high school in the 50s.

I remember all of that activity. And there was a communist behind every bush and the bomb might come off and we had to dive under our desks and people were building shelters. What happens is in these circumstances, and I really feel it strongly now, is that fear is exploited. And particularly in this situation where we had not adequately prepared for this kind of terrorist threat. We were still thinking along the kinds of engagements that had a Cold War element to them. I felt that the responsibility of our political leadership was to calm people, not to leverage it. James Cano, the Guantanamo defense attorney, takes it a step further. Fear drives hate. And one of the things that we saw in the policy process leading up to the

decision to use torture was how much people were blinded by fear and hate. In that situation, asking the question of, hey, is there any empirical support for this? Or, hey, is this what the seer techniques were designed for? Or, hey, didn't we try this once before and it was a failure? Those kinds of reasonable questions come to be perceived as weakness. I think that nobody wanted to ask the question of, is it actually going to work to torture people in the sense of generating good information? Because they didn't want to be seen as weak. And like Dr. Zanakis, he believes that these policies were not just driven by Mitchell and Jessen, or even a small political cabal. Torture is a bureaucracy. It takes not just, you know, a good-looking actor with a gun and a man

tied to a chair. I mean, somebody has to cook the food. Somebody has to take out the trash. Somebody has to check the prisoner to see if he has a temperature. Somebody has to say, yes, he's not nearly dead yet. You can keep abusing him. In the black sites, there were both doctors and other kinds of health care professionals. One of the points that those who have testified publicly about the program have stressed is the involvement of physicians. The role of physicians varied. There was a role for physicians in actual abusive interrogations where, as in other countries, a physician looked at the person and said,

stop or keep going. There was another role, which was more ordinary health care. Once a government adopts the reasoning of there are no limits, then really there are no limits. The professions get swept into the bureaucracy of torture just as much as trades do. There's something about the involvement of doctors and psychologists, those in the medical profession who we rely on to keep us well, the whole Hippocratic oath of do no harm. It just seems especially odious when the

military and medicine collide. The Nazi doctors and the need for the Nuremberg Code, then Dr. Cameron's experiments on unwitting patients, and no one in the medical profession questioned him at the time. And that led to other eras of torture under the Kubark Manual or the 1980s in Latin America to what followed 9-11. And those who objected, like Dr. Zanakis, were shunned. Few would decry the fact that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who does not dispute being an al-Qaeda leader, was tortured. But so were many others. And how do you justify sanctioned torture that took place in Gitmo and the Black Sites in a court of law? James Mitchell was defiant, combative at times when he testified in Guantanamo. And Jessen?

The thing I will never forget, the last day they got Bruce Jessen on the stand, Jessen comes in and sits down and he's like, Mr. Rogers. Does that work? Yeah, it definitely brings up a picture. Okay. Okay. So, you know, this man comes in, he comes off as very pleasant and, and genial. And he's like, Mr. Rogers.

And he's answering the questions. And he's, I mean, Mitchell is defensive for nine days, and angry, and hostile, and then in comes Jessen, who's very mild-mannered, in a completely different behavior, and he's being questioned, and there's a pause, and he looks over across this huge courtroom to the defendants who are 30, 40, 50 feet away from him, depending on where they are in relationship to the witness stand. And he just remarks, they've all grown up. They've just grown up. May I know who is who? I remember like the air leaving my chest.

Like, I was suffocating because it was such a strange moment. He somehow was portraying these men as if they were like children. They were his charges. They were his children. And now they're all grown up and dressed like adults. And to me, that is the moment that I will never forget. The 9-11 trial has been called the trial of the century, but it's looking more like it'll take a century to try.

It has been nearly two decades since the attack, seven years since the men were arraigned. There is no end in sight. The full Senate RDI report remains classified. No one has been charged or successfully sued over abuses that occurred during interrogations. In fact, some have been promoted. Gina Haspel was a senior officer overseeing the CIA's enhanced interrogation program. She came to the secret black site in Thailand just after test case number one, Abu Zubaydah, was tortured until he nearly died. She later helped destroy the almost 100 videotapes of his abuse.

Abu Zubaydah never provided any actionable intelligence as a result of his torture. He is now indefinitely detained in Guantanamo. And Gina Haspel? In 2018, US President Donald Trump appointed her as the CIA's new leader. Without accountability, history does tend to repeat itself. And sometimes justice, if it comes at all, takes decades. We want you to apologize. Please don't close the case. Next time on Brainwashed. We will continue to fight until we are heard.

We will keep fighting because we know that no judge could look at our case and say sorry too late. Because the damage is still so fresh today. Brainwashed is written and produced by Lisa Ellenwood, Chris Oak, and me, Michelle Shepard. Sarah Melton is our associate producer. Sound design by Cecil Fernandez. Thank you. Reference Library. And thanks to the Council of Foreign Relations for the audio of Alan Dulles. For discussions, posts, videos, and pictures, find us on social media. Just search for CBC Podcasts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Our theme song is Desert Novel by Key Witness. Brainwashed is produced by CBC Podcasts and The Fifth Estate. Another CBC Podcast you may like is Escaping NXIVM. Journalist Josh Bloch pulls back the curtain on the secretive self-help group experts call a cult and follows one woman's journey to get out. The podcast was featured in Rolling Stone magazine and named one

of the best podcasts of 2018 by The Atlantic. Find Escaping NXIVM on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.